Back
BABCOCK RANCH, Fla. - It's the closest thing this job has to an occupational hazard.
After a sunrise loop around Calusa Country Club in Lakewood Ranch east of Sarasota, I hopped in my car and drove 80 minutes of Florida back-country roads to an afternoon tussle with Webbs Reserve Golf Club, tucked deep in the rapidly-growing mega-community of Babcock Ranch.
Both Calusa and Webbs are brand-new Troon-managed golf courses that serve as the main attraction within large Lennar-branded residential communities that, at full build-out, will serve up to 1,400 and 800 members, respectively. Fashioned out of completely flat tracts, the courses wind through vast corridors of future homesites. A day's worth of steady 25 mile per hour winds turned acres of fill dirt into a rolling southwest Florida haboob.
After 36 holes of golf, I was covered in dirt and dust, coughing, sneezing and spitting it out as best I could. I felt like I had trudged eight hours through the desert. But in the end, it was nothing a good shower couldn't erase.
All in a day's work.
Florida is one of several golf construction hotbeds across the United States. With more than a dozen distinct new-build projects in some stage of development and more in the pipeline, it is the current leader in the clubhouse among cradles of new golf courses. After a decade-long hangover stretching from the late-2000s Recession to the post-COVID golf resurgence, far more courses closed than opened across the country. While there are still closures each year, the game's recent reversal in fortunes has brought things closer to equilibrium than at any time in nearly 20 years.
And Florida is far from alone.
The 5 hottest states and sub-regions for new golf development
Florida
Year-round warm weather, inexpensive land and a solicitous business environment are all factors contributing to Florida's continued golf boom. Traffic can be nightmarish in highly populated areas, especially in the winter, but it's not stopping thousands of people - many of them golfers - from moving south every week. This includes high net worth individuals and families flocking to the Palm Beaches, and with many existing clubs' membership rosters and waistlists full, money alone is not enough to get in. It's time to build some more clubs.
The aforementioned Calusa Country Club's 18-hole Gordon Lewis design is the first of three distinct golf amenities coming to that vast Lennar-planned community. A 12-hole loop is in the initial build phase, as is a 30,000 square foot putting course, inspired (like most others recently) by the famous Himalayas at St. Andrews in Scotland. Like Calusa, Webbs Reserve is a bundled community whose resort-style amenties are being built out rapidly. In bundled communities such as these, all new home purchases will also include club membership. The concept has been popular along the gulf coast of Florida for years and is spreading east. Astor Creek Golf & Country Club in Port St. Lucie, whose Chris Wilczynski-designed golf course opened in late 2023, is a rapidly growing bundled community and next door, Glynlea Golf & Country Club, within a new mega-community called Wylder, will also attach membership to home purchases when the course opens later this spring.
Florida is also a hotbed of super-high-end new golf course development. The most striking example is Apogee, a private club that is approaching completion at impressive pace. The Gil Hanse- and Jim Wagner-designed West Course opened at the tail end of 2024, the Tom Fazio II/Mike Davis-authored South Course welcomed its first golfers in the last weeks of 2024 and Kyle Phillips is building the new North course, expected to open in late 2025. The pace at which Apogee has gone from concept to full-fledged club reflects the white-hot demand for golf in the Sunshine State, even at the extreme high end. Within a few miles of Apogee, Tom Doak's new Sandglass course is on the verge of its own official start, while Atlantic Fields, a Discovery Land property, is well past the halfway point of building its own 18-hole course by Tom Fazio; a short course on property, alias Pineapple Express, is already up and running. And Ken Bakst, who brought in Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to design the sensational Friar's Head on Long Island, is working with longtime C&C associates Rod Whitman and David Axland and their partner Keith Cutten on a new private complex nearby as well. On the Panhandle, Davis Love III's team are about to open a new 18-hole course called The Third at WaterSound Golf Club. Cabot Citrus Farms officially debuted its brand-new Roost course, and we have already heard rumblings about more golf being added there before the end of the decade.
Texas
Everything is big in Texas, including momentum for new golf course development. The Austin area continues to be one of the fastest-growing metros in America, and golf is continuing to spring up beyond its city limits. Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston continue to attract new residents, with Texas' relatively low taxes attracting folks fleeing the northeast and California.
David McLay Kidd is hard at work on Loraloma, a private club on a bend in the Pedernales River just north of Austin Golf Club. Just a few miles away, Beau Welling is building the Travis Club, which will feature lakeside holes and homes. Welling is also the architect of record on a project called Freestone Lake Club outside of Dallas, while in Fort Worth, Discovery Land is prepping a new community called Maverick Golf & Ranch Club. In typical fashion, it will feature a Tom Fazio-designed course.
Some of the most exciting new courses coming to Texas are farther-flung. At the private Childress Hall in the Texas Panhandle southeast of Amarillo, Tom Doak is finishing up a course on choppy sandy land near the Red River, and Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner are building a course there as well. In the forested eastern regions of the state, near Nacogdoches, Dream Golf is nearing groundbreaking on Wild Spring Dunes, one of three new resorts the Mike Keiser-founded company is currently developing. Also near Fort Worth, Tiger Woods' next golf course, Bluejack Ranch, is expected to be open sometime in 2026.
South Carolina
As a former resident of South Carolina, I can personally vouch for the weather, the relatively low cost of living and the friendliness of the people. Add in the discovery of inexpensive, sandy land not far from Augusta, Georgia and you have a recipe for the kind of expansion in course development the state has seen in some of its more rural areas recently.
The excitement of golf architecture enthusiasts has been focused on the Palmetto State for a few years now, with both Old Barnwell and PGA Tour player Zac Blair's The Tree Farm coming online near the no-longer-sneaky-golf-rich town of Aiken recently. Farther east but on no less ideal golf terrain, Broomsedge, a Kyle Franz design with Mike Koprowski, opened in late 2024. Closer to Charleston, Tyler Rae is hard at work on his first 18-hole solo design, called Old Sawmill, while Beau Welling has been tasked with adding a third 18 for members of Kiawah Island's private club.
Down the coast, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw are laying out a new course at Palmetto Bluff, half an hour from Hilton Head. That 18-holer follows hot on the heels of The Crossroads, an inventive, reversible 9-hole layout architects Tad King and Rob Collins erected out of Lowcountry uplands within the last 18 months. Speaking of King, Collins and new associate Trevor Dormer, the trio are working on a new build near Aiken called The 21 Club, whose two-course plan includes an original match-play course as well as a reproduction of El Boqueron, a never-built Alister MacKenzie design from Argentina, with the help of Brian Zager, who assisted on the Lido in Wisconsin. Closer to Greenville, architect Andrew Green is developing Kawonu, a new private club.
The Upper Midwest
It might be odd to think that a state associated with cold weather would have the most golfers per capita, but Minnesota is a golf-mad state. So it's no wonder that it is home to a small handful of new golf projects, mostly in less-populated areas where land is less expensive and, while the golf is not year-round, the long summer daylight hours and mild temperatures create a golf frenzy for a few months each year.
This year will bring the debut of a new 18-hole course by John Fought at the private Windsong Farm Golf Club. The club, situated 25 miles west of Minneapolis, opened its John Fought/Tom Lehman-designed course in 2003. The new one will occupy a more intimate piece of land across the street from the original. Another private club, Tepetonka, is set to debut its course by the firm of Ogilvy Cocking Mead in 2026. Broadcast legend Jim Nantz is involved with the project, helping to oversee the design of the club's short course.
Minnesota's neighbor to the west, South Dakota, has multiple new golf design projects of its own. At Mapletøn Golf Club near Sioux Falls, architect Scott Hoffman seeks to build on the success of his design at Lost Rail near Omaha. And 190 miles west at Lazy J Ranch, writer-turned-architect Tom Coyne and partners Colton Craig and Steve Smyers will be building golf near the town of Ideal.
Another region that's building new courses in a heated rush is northern Michigan. The headliner is SkyFall, the new Gil Hanse course at Forest Dunes in Roscommon. The rest of the new projects are not regulation courses but either nine-holers or short courses - a reversible 10-hole executive course at Garland Lodge and Golf Resort, The Dozen at Arcadia Bluffs, the Doon Brae Short Course at The Highlands at Harbor Springs, the nine-hole Cedar Course by Paul Albanese at Island Resort & Casino in the upper peninsula and finally the Wee Course at Harbor Shores Resort (more western Michigan than northern).
Puerto Rico
After a period characterized by course closures and gradual post-hurricane rebuilding, Puerto Rico has been somewhat stuck in neutral on the golf front for years, even while other parts of the Caribbean add new courses.
But the American island territory is primed to take a leap forward on the golf front over the remainder of the 2020s. Moncayo, a private club with a course to be designed by Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert, will be the centerpiece of a 1,100-acre residential and golf community on the island's east coast, while Esencia, a Rees Jones design, will be built on the southwestern coast of the island. Closer to San Juan, the West Course at Dorado Beach Golf Club, which closed in 2017, is being revitalized and rebuilt practically from scratch by Robert Trent Jones, II. Jones' father, Robert Trent Jones, Sr., originally laid out the course.
Comments (0)